


For the Woman Who Has Everything

by wanderingaesthetic



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Canon-typical incestuous vibes, Gen, Jupiter Ascending Fic Challenge, Mummies, Space capitalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 01:12:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4686671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderingaesthetic/pseuds/wanderingaesthetic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of a Harvest, Balem finds a gift for Seraphi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Woman Who Has Everything

**Author's Note:**

> This work is for the First Jupiter Ascending Fic Challenge courtesy of fuckyeahjupiterascending.tumblr.com 
> 
> All errors are mine as I struggled against the deadline. :)

“This is marvelous,” Seraphi said, looking over the dead city. “Are you getting this?” she said over her shoulder. She cut a path through a small crowd of artists diversely equipped with brush and canvas, pencil and sketchbook, cameras that output in every dimension.

The train of her dress was striped black and gold, and she wore a gauzy cape that evoked the shape of wings. She was a bee, not just a symbol of royalty in general and House Abrasax in particular, but an insect that flitted from flower to flower gathering sweet nectar.

“Yours the flower, mine the fruit,” Balem said as he walked beside her. The bee theme informed his garb as well, in the thin gold stripes of his trousers and jewelry at ears and wrists the rich amber of honey.

“Hmm?” Seraphi said, not hearing him.

Balem shook his head.

“I know you don’t love this, don’t pout,” Seraphi chided him.

“I wouldn’t _dream_ of it.”

They strode through spiraling topiaries. They had taken this garden and the mansion it belonged to as their base while Seraphi worked on this project. They meandering led them to a low stone wall that marked the garden’s edge and overlooked at the silent city.

“Those bridges are a marvel,” Seraphi sighed, looking at the graceful arcs that passed between purple hills, just visible over the spires. A week ago they couldn’t have seen them through the smog.

“What I _do_ dream of,” Balem said as he took her hand and kissed it. “Is seeing you so happy.”

**

Not only the bodies of a tersie world are rent and rendered. Its culture, now dead, is sliced and sorted and sold at market price. Works of art, fashion, religion, whole buildings, stories read on clay tablets or delivered directly into the nervous system. All are slowly filtered into the culture of the Canabulum. When everything of value is taken, the rest is ground into cultural sausage: words, jokes, recipes, games of chance. Nothing wasted.

Seraphi saw it as a holy calling. The First Estate destroyed a population, and in doing so immortalized it.

Balem had no knack for it. He preferred numbers. Price and cost, optimum years of harvest, yields, profit margins. These things were predictable. These things made _sense._ He tried, once upon a time, to set fashion, but his preference for the dark but vaguely glimmering never caught on. He left such things to his mother and siblings now.

Balem saw beauty in the impersonal: rare metals, mountains higher than the first ring of Orus, storms that last generations. While his mother mined the tale of a dead planet, Balem went to its most inhospitable regions, incased in a small personal hovercraft, matte black and shaped like an arrowhead. Far from the eyes and assassins of populated worlds, he had little need for attendants, and no desire for company other than Seraphi.

Balem was looking, not just for something that tickled his senses, but for a gift for his mother, something that would turn her attention away from her dead world for a moment.

What do you give the woman who has everything?

His hunt brought him to a city on the opposite side of the world from Seraphi’s base, to a structure in the most traditional form of human architecture: a ziggurat. He parked his little craft by the square stone doorway, and shone its lights inside.

The massive structure was all one cavernous chamber. Balem’s footsteps reverberated as he approached the center. The chamber was mostly empty, but the interior did not match the ancient exterior. The floor was polished, stone mosaic, and orbs that were most likely light fixtures hung from the ceiling from long chains. Their shadows swung in the headlights of Balem’s vehicle.

The scent of decaying flowers hit Balem’s nostrils, and he saw in the center a rectangular glass case. The flowers had been left on the floor surrounding it, along with heaps of other things: stuffed animals, jewelry, fruit, candles, papers covered with writing in some spidery language.

This was a temple, Balem reasoned, and these were offerings to its god, as if these people had known their end was coming soon and hoped to stave it off.

He approached the glass case to peer inside. What he saw was a corpse.

Balem’s business often brought him into contact with the dead, but when his product was processed in the refineries the meat was fresh. This body was so desiccated that it took Balem a moment to understand that what he was looking at had once been a human, and wasn’t some rough brown carving of a figure in repose. It was well-preserved, but he or she looked nothing like they must have in life. The eyes sunk and the teeth were exposed. What remained of the hair was stringy black wire. The wrists and ankles were shrunken, and the skin stretched to show the shape of bone and muscle.

Who had this person been, to warrant such a monument being built around them? And why build a monument to someone so obviously dead?

Balem shoved aside the offerings nearest him to get a closer look. The clothing it wore may have once been a rich robe, but was now colorless and crumbling. The only thing the mummy wore that wasn’t decayed beyond recognition was a clear, oval jewel the size of Balem’s palm, clasped to its chest.

Balem leaned in, touching the glass case, and as soon as he did, a klaxon alarm sounded. Balem jerked upright, shocked that any security system in this place was still operable. The alarm wailed and a female voice played a recorded message in a language no one living understood.

Balem made for the doorway, wanting to leave now, but in no hurry. The message repeated, and a metal door fell like a guillotine, leaving Balem in complete darkness and cutting off his only known exit.

The sensory deprivation clutched his chest in a brief moment of panic, but he quelled the emotion quickly. He reached to the nub behind his right ear to send a message to his mother: location and a request to be picked up as soon as convenient. No need to worry her.

He sat on the smooth stone floor, and drew his robes around him. He considered groping around for another exit in the dark, but thought better of it. Better to sit and wait for rescue than to let his mind create horrors from the absence of sensory data.

With nothing else to do, Balem contemplated this tomb’s only other occupant. Balem’s fancy made the figure a she, some queen or prophetess who had led her people to enlightenment and wealth. The jewel she held was some holy relic, evidence of her favor with the gods.

How long had she lived, and how long had she been dead? This planet had been seeded some ten thousand years ago, so it couldn’t have been longer than that. His mother, queen and prophetess in her own right, had seen ten times the span of this entire race. Yet this one must have accomplished so much to have been so honored, all in a life the length of a season.

_Will Seraphi be so remembered?_ Balem wondered. _Will her tomb be so fine?_

He laughed at the thought of Seraphi needing a tomb, and the darkness laughed back at him.

**

In less than an hour she came for him, striding in a whirl of lace and attendants and Sargorn lasering down the door.

“What were you _thinking_ going off alone like that?” she scolded and batted him gently on the cheek, but she was more amused than angry.

“Look, mother,” Balem said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. In the lights his rescue party had brought, they could see the ceiling, golden stars and symbols on a background of rich blue, and a swath of iridescent color that must represent an arm of the galaxy. The orbs that hung from the ceiling were now obvious as planets, and at the center, above the dead queen, an enormous crystal orb that must represent this planet’s sun.

“Oh, how lovely!” Seraphi exclaimed.

“I thought you might like it,” he said with the tiniest of smiles. “We could have it moved to Cerise, perhaps? We’ll want to remove the mummy, of course.”

Seraphi gasped as she saw the tomb’s occupant for the first time.

“Of course. How ghastly.”


End file.
